Category Archives: Reviews

Mobile games are time wasters. That’s the primary purpose of games on my phone. Whether I’m in a waiting room or even at school they are time wasters and not a gaming machine. Minecraft doesn’t fall into the category of a ‘time waster’ for me. So how is it?

Minecraft was released a couple of weeks back and I’ll be doing another review on that soon or just a update on new features. Even before Minecraft was released there was development of the game coming to other platforms which is always exciting, especially Minecraft coming to the Xbox but Minecraft to the phone? Could it be possible? It already had been possible for months on the Xperia if I’m not mistaken. I don’t have an Xperia so I got it when it came out to other phones, I have a Desire HD and I have to say it’s really cool on the big screen.

Unfortunately this review won’t be like a review of Minecraft on the PC. I’m not sure of the exact process of porting a game onto another platform and in most cases it is often frowned upon, not so much in Battlefield 3s case, it was actually praised, the porting apparently made the game better on console because of the advancements on the PC. PC elitists may disagree but who cares what they think? Anyway, getting slightly off topic. It really feels like they’ve tried to put the whole game onto a phone then slowly bringing it back and removing content until it runs well, and it does but with a lot less items and environmental features.

At first I didn’t appreciate Minecraft that much but later on you start to appreciate that actually the game is pretty massive. One unaltered world is something like 12 million blocks but don’t quote me on that and with the texture shader that was added in the beta the graphics got a lot more intense. You also don’t appreciate the render distance in Minecraft, it might not be a lot compared to other games but once you open Minecraft: Pocket Edition you really notice the difference. It took me a little while to notice but the render distance is pretty much non existent when you compare it to Minecraft on the PC. That might be a bit of an exaggeration. Also after a little bit of exploring I noticed that you do eventually come to an end of your world. On the PC I haven’t experienced this. Digging down it’s something like 64 blocks down which which is a lot less than on the PC and the only ore I’ve found so far is iron so I’m not sure if there is other ores down in the ground. Minecraft on the PC it takes forever to get to the bottom. Falling through the Earth has been taken out which I’m not surprised about.

The whole game at the moment is Creative mode which a lot of people won’t be happy about. Personally I don’t mind, I don’t have the patience to start a whole Survival game on a phone. Not everything is bad though after all, it is Minecraft! One of the best games created in my opinion. The auto jump is a great idea, the controls aren’t amazing, sliding your thumb around the screen and the clumsy directional controls in the corner obstruct a large amount of your view so not having to tap that jump button all the time is great. The filling, negative circle is a nice touch, the crumbling block animation as you click on it is a little pointless since your thumb is in the way. I haven’t played over WiFi yet, I haven’t had the opportunity to but I imagine it is pretty cool and a lot more exciting.

Believe me when I say I love Minecraft but I do not think this is worth €4.99. It’s probably worth $5 or something as well. When I say it’s not worth it I mean it’s not worth it at the moment. Right now there isn’t environmental features and enough objects that make the game great. Huge mountains, cave systems and mobs are needed to make this game at least standard. I know comparing this to the PC version is a little bit unfair but it’s the only thing that we know and the PC version is the standard. Mojang have been raising the bar more and more and right now it doesn’t even feel like alpha, pre alpha more like. I have full confidence that Mojang will make Minecraft just as good as it is on the PC, my only fear is that will it only come with new and better phones? I’ll definitely check out Minecraft on the Xbox 360 when it comes out so check this space for that.

Finally the long awaited Battlefield 3 has arrived! I started playing Battlefield when Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came out. A lot of hardcore Battlefield fans might say ‘no!’ to me but even though the campaign wasn’t that great the multiplayer was were that game shined. I don’t care what people say, Bad Company 2’s multiplayer was damn good and it was damn fun. I don’t care if it didn’t have jets in it, it was my first Battlefield game and it was epic. Anyway, this isn’t about Bad Company 2. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this game is an improvement to its previous games, I know I should be comparing this to Battlefield 2 more than Bad Company 2 but unfortunately I never played it. I know there are slight differences between console and PC versions of the game, for this review I will be talking about the Xbox 360 version. Again the hardcore Battlefield along with the PC community will be going crazy at me and may not even take this review seriously but it’s the platform that I play most of my games on. I did try to get the beta working on my PC. I recently upgraded my PC because my old one couldn’t run anything but sadly for some reason even after I downloaded the driver it told me to download it wouldn’t let me join a match. I would just sit there staring at a spinning circle on Battlelog.

One main thing about Battlefield that everyone loves is the graphics. I thought the graphics were really good in Bad Company 2 and when I heard they were stepping up their engine to Frostbite 2 I was really excited. I play Battlefield 3 on the console so obviously the graphics aren’t going to be superior, if you play console you’re just going to have to accept that and if you don’t you’re stupid. This is coming from a console gamer so don’t get too offended. Coming up to the release I was a little bit scared how the game would look and run on the Xbox 360. I heard a lot of crap from mostly PC elitists who have nothing better to do than to insult console gamers. I’ve played the game for almost 24 hours and I can safely say that you don’t have to listen to anyone who says this game plays terribly on console because it doesn’t. It simply doesn’t. I only ever found one recurring problem and I doubt it happened on PC was that there was sometimes a huge drop in frames per second during the single player. This only happened maybe four or five times throughout the roughly seven hour campaign. During multiplayer the only problems I have encountered was server lag and quick match problems, each of them I only encountered maybe around three times which is a lot less than what everyone else is complaining about.

The singleplayer is pretty awesome. I’ve only played this and Bad Company 2 and the Bad Company 2 campaign wasn’t that great so I didn’t have much to compare it to. I don’t want to compare it too much to Call of Duty because they really are different games and you’ll understand that more if you play a lot of video games. I installed the HD texture pack straight away so I haven’t don’t a comparison but I have seen one and there is a difference. There’s a difference in the small detail of things but there isn’t in the big picture if that makes sense. I would say, don’t play this game without the texture pack. There isn’t any reason not too and it does make a difference. It’s the small things that make a difference! Call of Duty campaigns rarely disappoint. I’ve played since World at War and I have played the COD4 campaign and I haven’t been disappointed by one yet. I’ve heard that the singleplayer of Battlefield 3 was just an excuse to show off the graphics. Even if it was they’ve done a good job. The dark knight in the city alone was really eerie. The whole singleplayer had a great atmosphere around it the whole time. Right at the beginning they make sure you see the handcuffs around your wrists which I thought was pretty cool once I got to the end of the singleplayer. My favourite mission was when you were playing as the Russians in Paris. That mission was really colourful and I really liked the gun I was given.

Now down to the multiplayer. This is what everyone is excited about and rightly so. Bad Company 2’s multiplayer was a lot of fun but it definitely wasn’t perfect. No game is ever going to be perfect but this one is amazing. One of my favourite things about this game is the animation of the characters. When you think about it, it’s a small thing but now I realise how huge and important it is. The animation of the Engineer reloading an RPG, Gustav or AT4 in Bad Company was god awful. In Battlefield 3 the animations are so smooth. The running animation is so realistic I find myself staring at other people in the game rather than doing anything. Of course, the thing that everyone loves in Battlefield are the jets. I’m just going to be honest here, I suck major nut sack at the jets. I can fly them but I fail sometimes and crash but most of the time I just can’t shoot anything else done with my god damn gun! 300 points doesn’t seem that much when you look at the little progress bar but the odds are against you when you are flying against a pilot who has flares, heat seeking missiles, the fancy map thing that I don’t know the name of. I got this game on the 31st of October. I preordered it so I have the limited edition with the code for the Back to Karkand DLC. I live in Europe so I had to wait a couple more days to get it. By the time I got it loads of people were already flying around with all this jet gear that I’m probably not going to get till Battlefield 4! Personally I shine on the ground with a gun in my hands, that’s the player I am.

The multiplayer is amazing but it isn’t perfect. I find myself getting spawn killed a lot, and when I say a lot I mean a lot. It could just be my fault and I’m sure some of them are but it just seems like it happens way too much. I could be really stupid and not realise that people are in combat and I shouldn’t spawn on them. They have taken spawn invincibility out of the game which I guess I’m happy about. In Bad Company 2 it was such a bitch and it would always cost me a kill. That is probably the only criticism of the multiplayer. I like the idea of the degrading vehicles. I don’t like the idea of vehicles regenerating health but when I heard what DICE said about it I felt better, to keep vehicles in the game and make them more of a core part of combat. It seems like they have taken out of decreased at least the recharge of the defibulators. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing in terms of gameplay but I like it. One thing I really praise DICE for doing is increasing the amount of points for capturing or destroying an M-COM. This really helps people actually go for the objective. I still get frustrated when nobody does it but it feels like more people are trying harder to get to the objective.

For some reason I can’t get into Battlelog and check out my stats. I’ll keep trying and get back to you if I can.

This game definitely has a lot of play time in it, much more than Bad Company 2. I will be playing this game a lot and I’m really looking forward to the DLC. This game is really awesome and there is no reason why you should be on the fence about buying this game.

I still rage in the multiplayer but I give it the double thumbs up, 9/10

By the way, I did a MW3 wish list a while back and I didn’t do one for Battlefield 3. The reason for that is because I wasn’t worried that this game was going to be a disappointment.

I love Minecraft and after aimlessly scrolling down my Facebook News Feed I saw the greatest thing ever, ‘Minecraft 1.8 is out! Go grab! :D.’ I quickly opened up Minecraft and ran the updater and hey ho I now have Minecraft 1.8. A pre-release of Minecraft 1.8 was released not too long ago but I couldn’t be bothered to go and get that when 1.8 was only days away.

The feature I was looking forward to the most was the Creative mode. Minecraft pretty much fuelled my IGCSEs. At my school we each get a laptop and a lot of us would play Minecraft non-stop. Even with two years of Minecrafting I passed with pretty good grades that I’m happy with. After the amount of hours I have put into Survival mode I was really happy to see this implemented into the game. After I played it on the web version of Minecraft when my friend hosted a server on there I really wanted it in the game. I have just started creating some huge pillars that will be the entrance to a mansion or something amazing.

The new start menu looks great, the game is starting to feel like a proper game with lots of content that won’t get boring as quickly as previous updates did. It has been Minecraft tradition for me to play the game religiously then eventually get bored. Starting a new game or waiting for a new update has always been the ‘cure’ but now it seems like this is the start of something great for Minecraft. A new feature is sprinting. Normal jumping will allow you to jump two blocks, while sprinting you can jump four blocks. If you hit an animal or an enemy while sprinting you perform a critical hit and do more damage. You now get steak from cows which was something I often thought about when I killed a cow, ‘why don’t you get any meat from the cows?’ Well now you do! There are now NPC villages but unfortunately they are not inhabited with NPCs. 1.8 is such a huge update it is being split into two updates. In 1.9 there should be NPCs walking around in villages. There are now, lakes and rivers and other things of that nature, I don’t think they have current though. A huge thing added to Survival mode is hunger. You’re hunger level will slowly deplete and when it reaches zero, your health will slowly go down too. Some may find this annoying but then again you are playing Survival. Hair grows back on sheep now, I’m not sure if that is going to be in 1.9 or not. I’ve only played 1.8 for little under and hour, I just really wanted to get something out about it. Go watch videos! Read other articles! You’ll get more information there.

I have recently been getting into more PC games, partially so I could play with friends and partially because every game developer decided to release their games all at the same time at the end of the year. Anyway, I upgraded my piece of crap computer to a better one, not exceptionally good but pretty good to do what I need it to do, I’m not a PC gamer so I’m not going to shed out ridiculous amounts of money on a computer.

My friend told me that I must get Team Fortress 2 because it’s ‘amazing’. I remember seeing this title in a store a long time ago, probably when it just came out and I thought it looked pretty damn awesome but I never played it until a few weeks ago, and I have to say this is one of the best multiplayer experiences I have ever had. Team Fortress 2 is so much fun despite the high learning curve of each class.

I love the way this game looks. I have never seen a game that looks cartoony and fun yet so amazing and hard. Most of the classes actually take skill to master unlike in COD when anyone can have at least a small amount of success. If you’re one of those douche bags who run around with Ghost, Second Chance and a noob tube then this game might not be for you.

Each class is made up of a primary weapon, a secondary weapon and a melee weapon, some classes have more things, the Engineer has another two spots to create and demolish buildings and the Spy has an extra slot for disguises. Each class is different in it’s own way, they all wield their own weapons. The Soldier has a rocket launcher, shotgun and a shovel, the Scout has a Scattergun (shotgun), a pistol and a baseball bat, the Pyro has a flamethrower, a shotgun and a fire axe, the Demoman has a grenade launcher, don’t worry, it’s not like the noob tubes in Call of Duty, the grenades don’t explode on impact unless they hit someone, a sticky bomb launcher which can be detonated at anytime and a whiskey bottle, the Heavy has a mini gun, a shotgun and his fists, the Engineer has a shotgun, a pistol, a wrench, a PDA to create buildings and another to demolish. The Medic has a syringe gun, a medigun which heals people and a saw. The Sniper has a sniper rifle, a sub machine gun and a sword. Finally, the Spy has a revolver, a sapper which destroys buildings, a knife to backstab and finally a book of disguises.

These are all the vanilla loadouts of the classes, these slots can be change to different weapons, e.g. the Scout can change his secondary to a jar of milk or different energy drinks, the Demoman can have a range of different swords. There are a lot of items that I’m not going to go into because it would take forever.

Even though there is a learning curve on this game, there is a class for everyone. My favourites are the Scout and the Soldier. The Scout is definitely one of the hardest to master along with the Spy. The easiest is the Pyro, you’ll often hear people say W+M1, the mantra of the Pyro. If you play this game you’ll understand.

One thing I love about this game is that it is so balanced, there is nothing in this game that I’ve really gotten worked up about or that’s made me rage quit, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever raged quitted from this game. I have shouted at my monitor because of Spies killing me a lot but then I stop and realise that the Spy class is really hard and either they are too good or I’m not playing right. Obviously Jesus made a really good comment on this game, ‘The moment you start making your vanilla weapons looks bad is the moment you have an unbalanced game.’ This is so true and Team Fortress 2 doesn’t fall into the unbalanced category. I still use the vanilla Scattergun for the Scout, I used the vanilla rocket launcher for the Solider for a long time, I use the vanilla syringe and medigun for the medic.

This game was recently made F2P, you may be called a F2P noob when you start, somehow I didn’t. A lot of people complained that they bought the game the day before it went F2P but to be honest, it’s worth the $10 or £10 or €10. There are a bunch of benefits to upgrading to a premium account, you can trade with other players, get more inventory space, that was the big one for me. I went into the store and found a cheap item that I wanted and bought it, it cost me 74 cents to upgrade my account. I have hardly covered anything in this article, maybe I’ll do another one on each class, discussing strategies and ways to play each class. There’s no reason not to try out this game, it’s free!

I wasn’t looking forward to play this game but I had a chance to play it and there wasn’t anything better around so I did. I have to admit that I haven’t seen any of the movies or played any of the games. I do intend to watch the movies but I had no intention to play the games.

I played most of the coop campaign with a friend and I the game looks really nice. The graphics look really smooth and the lighting in the game is really awesome. You really notice the light pouring over the characters in some of the landscapes. As you can expect from a Japanese developer, parts of the game are really over the top but I’m not saying that’s bad. Some of the melee attacks are really cool but I didn’t like the over the top one liners in the cut scenes. In my opinion when you have an over dramatic cut scene it does the opposite of making the situation dramatic, it makes it seem silly.

The one thing a game needs is good controls and this game doesn’t have it. I struggled turning around corners, it felt like I was lower than the lowest sensitivity and to my knowledge I couldn’t change it. I like the idea of picking things up around the map to aid you in your game but when I fighting off a horde of infected to change a weapon I had to go into my inventory and find a weapon that had ammo, in terms of seconds it doesn’t take long but when you compare that time to pressing ‘Y’ to change your weapon, it’s a huge difference.

I liked that the game was centred around team work with Sheva and some of the missions were cool, in that you couldn’t do it unless you were cooperating with your partner. One thing I expected to be cool was that there was no hip fire sights or reticle but a laser from your gun. That idea was really cool but when I played it seemed really hard for me to hit specific places on a body e.g. the head. I played this on coop so it was even harder when my portion of the screen was smaller. I mentioned ammo previously, throughout the whole time I played this game I was 80% of the time out of ammo. If you ask me, that’s ridiculous. You’re not playing the game to its full potential if you’re only using the horrific knife melee attack. The knife attack is probably the worst thing I’ve seen in a game for a while. When knifing you pull out your knife but you can’t move. Not only do you have no bullets for your guns but when you pull out your knife you stab enemies you have to stay in a stationary position and let the enemies come to you.

Now this is just my personal opinion and I don’t want it to affect this review, I’m not a huge fan of boss fights unless it’s something like Sonic fighting against Doctor Eggman, something fun like that. In a serious game I’m not a huge fan, it feels like the pace of the game has been intentionally slowed down so the bosses in the game feel more powerful when a good action game should consistently be fasts paced.

I know this review has been extremely negative but it’s just my take on the game. I’m probably not the best person to write about the series, that’s why I haven’t talked about the story too much. I haven’t watched any of the movies or played any past games so I don’t feel like I should comment on them. I’ll finish this off on a positive note, the enemies look amazing in this, the flying monsters and the creatures that come out of the infected look insane. That’s all I have to say.

I have to admit, I wasn’t the greatest at the first Portal, it took me a little longer than some people, not like 5 hours longer or anything but it was a different story regarding Portal 2. I finished Portal 2 a couple of days ago and have been meaning to write about it. I finished it over 2 days. The first day I was so excited I played it for like 8 hours straight. The next day I polished it off in 2 hours. Gameplay wise it was approximately 10 hours or so and what a 10 hours it was!

It’s amazing how much content you can squeeze out of the Source engine and it still looks up to date with current games. It doesn’t look as amazing as games like Crysis 2 or anything but no one plays Portal 2 for the graphics, you play it for the gameplay and I think this is a perfect game to explain how I am trying to look at games currently and in the future. A lot of review sites review games based on gameplay, graphics, sound and longevity but I want to add another factor that people don’t seem to take into account when rating a game, how fun it is. All the other factors are still hugely important but I think the fun factor trumps them all and that’ll play an important part in this review and others to come.

Portal 2 takes place years after the first Portal. Aperture Laboratories are overgrown with nature and you have just come out of stasis. GLaDOS is dead. As you progress through the game the laboratories are slowly rebuilt. Portal 2 is even more funny than the last one in my opinion. With the addition of Wheatley, voiced by Stephen Merchant and Cave Johnson, (every line he has is hilarious) voiced by J. K. Simmons there are more hilarious quotes than the last. And of course GLaDOS, voiced by Ellen McLain, comes back in the sequel who is equally funny if not more.

Now into the meat of the game, the puzzles. In the first one there wasn’t too many puzzles. I believe there were 19 test chambers and more puzzles when you escaped. In Portal 2 I think there are 41 test chambers, that sounds way too much but I think there are 22 in the first section then 19 later on and that isn’t including puzzles when you escape… I think. Don’t hold me to those numbers. Basically there is a crap load more puzzles to solve in Portal 2. I don’t know what it was, maybe because I had played the first one and knew what I was getting into or Portal 2 was easier but I zoomed through the singleplayer. I got stuck on 2 or 3 puzzles but I solved them in the end. Most importantly I didn’t use a walkthrough! In Portal, if you get stuck all you got to do is keep on moving around the test chamber until you see the puzzle in a different way. I did that (and stayed calm and didn’t throw my controller across the room) and I ended up solving puzzles I got stuck on and it feels pretty good when you’re stuck on a puzzle for 45 minutes then suddenly you get a brainwave and you solve it!

I know I can’t complain because Portal 2 is a lot longer than the first and it could be because I played it a lot on the first day but I really wish there were more puzzles to solve! I hope Portal 2 is supported with a crap load of DLC. And I haven’t had a chance to play coop yet, hopefully that will take up a lot of my time.

There isn’t much else to Portal other than voice and gameplay. It’s a really fun game. The puzzles aren’t too difficult that you get frustrated and you never feel as if it’s the games fault. I was really pleased with the ending of it too but I won’t ruin anything. If you haven’t played it, go play it. It’s a different game to others and it’s a lot of fun even if you aren’t shooting at people.

A lot of gamers whether hardcore or just recreational gamers will say that COD 4 is one game that you must play. I first played the COD 4 campaign a couple of weeks ago and it turned out to be my second favourite COD campaign, Black Ops being my favourite. It just felt so much more realistic.

Obviously I was a little confused at some parts of MW2 because I had never played the first Modern Warfare but this one filled in all the pieces. I managed to knock out the whole campaign in one sitting in an afternoon, determined to get it finished. Whilst playing I encountered the best Call of Duty mission I have ever played, sniping with Captain MacMillan. MW2 was epic, I loved the airport massacre mission just as much as the next guy and I love Ghost and the rest of the characters but the overall atmosphere of COD 4 captured me.

As soon as I completed the campaign I hopped over to multiplayer and had pretty good results. My friend previously mentioned that the snipers were immense, just like the rest of the community. I’m not a Call of Duty sniper, I can only snipe on Battlefield, so having good scores with a sniper in Call of Duty was a big deal for me. My best scores were with the MP5 and the M4 Carbine.

At first I was surprised that I hadn’t come across any hacking, turns out I just had to play the game a little more. Pretty much as soon as I came across the first floating enemy I took the game out of the disc tray, not only floating enemies but people advertising their COD hacking websites at the side of the screen.

Finally I can see why most fans still think COD 4 is still one of the best Call of Duty games